The present invention relates generally to electrical connectors, and more particularly, to a retaining mechanism for connecting a connector to a circuit board particularly suited for dense circuit boards such as a data acquisition system of a computed tomography system.
Electrical connections for various types of systems are commonly located in hard to reach and compact locations. One example of such a device is a computed tomography (CT) device. Computed tomography systems are complex systems that include an X-ray detector made up of a number of detection modules that are electrically coupled to a data acquisition system (DAS). A method for connecting a module to a data acquisition system is via a flex circuit attached to a connector. The connector provides the electrical path between a module and the DAS. During the manufacturing and servicing processes, the connection between the connector and the data acquisition system must be connected and disconnected multiple times.
The data acquisition system is a densely populated circuit board and thus has a number of components and a number of traces therein. Due to the large number of connections and limited space available, making reliable, serviceable connections is difficult. Also, detector modules as well as the DAS system are susceptible to damage from electro static discharge (ESD), thus the connector design necessarily needs to incorporate ESD protection to allow safe connections and disconnections. Further, the connection of the detector to the DAS is susceptible to microphonics, leakage and particulate contamination all of which can lead to electrical noise and image quality problems in the case of a CT scanner. Because a number of pins are used to connect the flex connector and the data acquisition system, the removal of the flex connector portion must be performed without bending the interconnection pins.
It would therefore be desirable to provide a retaining mechanism for an electrical connector that does not interfere with a densely populated circuit board.